In the next month or so, we're going to have to shutdown our Exadata Database Machine (V2).

I understand the steps needed to shutdown the comp nodes and the storage cells cleanly, but not so much the switches.

Do I shutdown the Infiniband switches before the Cisco switch? Or vice versa? I presume the order is reversed when we come to bring the machine back up?

How important is it for us to do a clean shutdown (I presume you can issue 'shutdown -h now' on the IB switches as they're Linux? Is simply getting the comp nodes/storage cells down cleanly and pulling the power to the unit sufficient?

How important is it for us to do a clean shutdown (I presume you can issue 'shutdown -h now' on the IB switches as they're Linux? Is simply getting the comp nodes/storage cells down cleanly and pulling the power to the unit sufficient?

You won't be able to shutdown the IB switches - that's by design. After all storage cells and compute nodes are shutdown, power can be removed from the PDUs which will obviously shut down the switches.

Also, there's no order with respect to switch startup/shutdown. The Cisco Ethernet switch and the IB switches can be started simultaneously. All of those switches should be up and running (allow 4 or 5 minutes for bootup) before starting up the storage cells, then compute nodes.

The startup and shutdown procedures are in the documentation - owner's guide chapter on maintaining the database machine (should be chapter 7).